Desiblitz Film Fusion, 2022: East is East - rethinking about Immigration

East is East (film, 1999)

Writer: Ayub Khan-Din

Director: Damien O’Donnell

Post-screening Q&A session: Leslee Udwin (Producer) and Jordan Routledge (Sajid)

The playwright Trevor Griffiths once stated that his works have always probed into the question of how we can transform the husk of this capitalist enterprise into some kind of meaningful socialist reality. In other words, how do we change the way we think about our relationships with one another and social cohesion; between individual freedom and the need for order and governance?

By delving into such concerns, we are involved in a political enquiry that addresses relationships between differing social/cultural groups. Our perspective could be in the interest of the whole or part of our country. But both points of view are dependent on our individual politics.

This point of intertextualisation is apt in relation to Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East with Damien O’Donnell as its director.

The title is a nod to the Rudyard Kipling poem, The Ballad of East and West in which the poet states ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’. That, in itself, is a political statement and one that defines an authorial perspective. For instance, the fact that Khan-Din chose a colonial author and his lines to create a springboard for his film (though originally a play), suggests something fundamentally akin to colonial politics. In essence, the film is an illustration of an enquiry about how we handle the influx of foreigners in Britain. As such, the author can either condemn or condone the policy of immigration. But, in actual fact, Khan-Din does neither and instead paves a third way.

East is East is an picture of a cultural situation depicted as a result of an interracial marriage between George (Pakistani – played by Om Puri) and the English woman, Ella (Linda Bassett).

George is a proud, working-class chip shop owner. He wants to raise his children to be respectable Pakistani Muslims. But in the early 1970s, there was very little understanding amongst different cultural groups – so much so that casual racism was common place. George’s children try and navigate themselves as best they can in a cultural transit where they are considered neither fully English nor Pakistani. They are too English for the Muslim community but too Pakistani for the white, English people. In depicting this, is Khan-Din showing us a piece of aestheticism or racial/cultural paradox?

This line of enquiry is relevant because we could pose the question as to whether the overall impression - the end result – is an expression of art or politics.

In this regard, we might challenge the adage art for art sake. Is everything reliant on a range of other sources and so, exist in relation to something else? Aren’t all artists the by-products of their social, cultural and political circumstance and what they produce is a reflection of the effects of those factors on their imagination? Isn’t art a statement of the artist and his version of the human condition?

For instance, on a basic level, the film is a depiction of the immigrant experience and people’s dealing with difference and bigotry. There is no denying of that – it’s a social documentation of a particular period in British history.

The film is an illustration of the interconnectedness of people in a global community, about belonging and identity, about culture, lineage and tradition, and about belonging and security in a burgeoning world of change and modernity.

As Leslee Udwin (the producer) stated in the Q&A session, from the point of view of progress, George is a character who is easy to dislike. He is a hard, no-nonsense man who runs his family like a dictator – a sort of Genghis Khan (according to his children). He is a man refusing to accept that the cultural (as well as the physical) landscape has changed. He is not living in Pakistan of the 1940s but in an emerging multicultural Britain. So, coupled with the sporadic bouts of domestic violence suffered by Ella and the children, it is convenient to mark him as the deluded, ignorant villain. This interpretation sits comfortably with today’s proponents of misogyny and patriarchy.

But in relation to tradition and conservatism, George could also be seen as trying desperately to help his children to maintain their religious values and cultural heritage. They are, after all, in an unwelcoming, alienating world – a divisive and antagonistic Britain that excludes immigrants like him. The instilling of traditional cultural values - what his peers are instructing him to do – is, therefore, a safe option. Hence George’s insistence that his children have arranged marriages – it’s for their benefit. George does not want his children to feel like outsiders but people who have a cultural base and some ownership of that space. To him Islam and his community provide that.

So, when his children start challenging his authority and chipping away at his stranglehold, it leaves him forlorn. He becomes a vulnerable man at odds with the change sweeping all around him. Everything he knew is being transformed into some other reality. In this context, we can very easily feel empathy for George because he is just as much a victim as he is an aggressor.

However, the answer to the problem of immigration and multiculturalism lies not with the older children because they are far too subversive even for the indigenous white community of the time. The eldest son, Nazir (Ian Aspinall), for instance, is living with a man; Saleem (Chris Bisson) – ‘Pablo bleeding Picasso' – is supposedly studying engineering at college but is actually studying modern art, producing a vagina exhibit ‘to show the commercialisation of the female body'; Maneer (Emil Marwa) is too fearful, obedient and subservient to function independently; Tariq (Jimmi Mistry) is Jack the lad and lacks focus and a serious work ethic whilst Meenah (Archie Panjabi) is a tomboy who swears, plays football in the street, and eats pork.

The actual answer lies with the 11-year old Sajid (Jordan Routledge) and his white friend, Earnest (Gary Damer). Initially, Sajid shows a closeness and a certain tenderness for his father not evidenced by any of the other siblings. He is the only child who sticks up for George when tensions are running high. Similarly, Earnest is always fighting against the racial divide that separates him from the Khans. His grandfather (played by John Bardon) is a man courting Enoch Powell's politics of racial segregation and hatred. Earnest, however, shows tolerance, understanding and compassion that his own grandfather – not unlike George – seem to lack. Both sets of communities are characterised by prejudice, racism and hard-nosed bigotry; both feeling that their cultural identity is under threat.

The solution and the future don't rest with George nor his older children – people who occupy polar ends of the discourse. ?The answer (even after a quarter of a century since the play was premiered, 1996) lies with people like Sajid and Earnest who are sensitive, culturally open and respectful of difference. If there is going to be a transformation in our society about the way we think of immigration and assimilation, it will come from such people. Only they with their genuine interest in humanity and difference can create a meaningful and cohesive social reality that works in the interest of all.